Tag Archive for abortion

I’ve said this before and I’m going to keep saying it as long as I have to. The terrifying thing about abortion bans like Alabama’s is not their manifest contempt for women. It’s what this can result in three or four steps down the road.

If a woman doesn’t have the right to decide to end her pregnancy, then she doesn’t have the right to decide to continue it, either.

These laws put that decision in the hands of the state. Right now we’re in an evangelical, life-begins-at-conception phase. No one can have an abortion; that’s what these laws purport to say. But they don’t say that. They say the state, not the woman, gets to decide. And what happens when our attitude shifts, as attitudes do?

Deformed fetuses. Fetuses that’ll grow into disabled adults. Fetuses genetic testing indicates will be diseased. Maybe we should abort them, whatever the woman carrying them thinks, to save everyone the heartbreak — and cost — of their short, unproductive lives.

The sixth pregnancy of an opioid-addicted woman already on welfare. Maybe we should abort it, whatever the woman carrying it thinks, because she clearly can’t look after the kids she’s got.

Muslims.

Blacks.

Jews.

“JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!”

They sure won’t, if they don’t get born.

China did it for decades. Every woman who already had a child had to, by law, abort any further pregnancies. Can’t happen here?

Why not?

If the state gets to decide then the state gets to decide EITHER WAY. This is not about banning abortion, not about abortion per se at all.